I want to follow up on something that jumped out at me from our collection of dress code rules: the ones justified as a way of preventing students from joining gangs (Olga noted that trend here). “We weren’t allowed to wear any Dickies-brand clothing or backpacks,” writes one reader who attended a Georgia public school in the early 2000s. “They were considered a ‘gang symbol’.” Another reader: “Because one of the gangs had adopted Mickey Mouse as one of its symbols, we were not allowed to wear anything with Mickey Mouse on it.”

This reader thinks school administrators invoke gangs as a catch-all for dress violations:

Everyone I knew who violated the dress code did so for almost exactly the same reason: wearing clothes that were too baggy or wearing something that was believed to be gang-affiliated. A particularly unusual example of this is when a star-student friend of mine came to school with a mohawk and had to get it shaved off. Some of the teachers believed it demonstrated some sort of gang affiliation, which it clearly did not.

Whether Dickies or Mickeys or mohawks are gang-related symbols remains an open question, but do dress codes actually help prevent students from joining gangs? I reached out to Professor Todd A. DeMitchell of the University of New Hampshire, who, along with University of Louisiana Professor Richard Fossey (the pair co-authored a book on dress codes and the First Amendment), emailed some thoughts. They begin with some historical context:

For nearly a century, student-dress codes and the litigation they have spawned have been important policy concerns for the public schools. One of the earliest legal battles was Pugsley v. Sellmeyer, a 1923 case out of Arkansas. In that dispute, Pearl Pugsley was disciplined for wearing talcum powder on her face in violation of a school policy prohibiting students from wearing transparent hosiery, “face-paint,” cosmetics, or immodest dress.

The Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the school’s rule on the grounds that it was reasonable and not oppressive, but in later years, courts have sometimes sided with students in dress-code disputes.

Thus, while most courts have approved bans on the wearing of Confederate flags and insignias on the grounds that these symbolic forms of expression may trigger racial conflict, they have split with regard to whether students have a First Amendment right to affix other social and political messages on their clothing. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a student has no constitutional right to wear a T-shirt condemning homosexuals, while the Seventh Circuit held that students have a First Amendment right to wear T-shirts proclaiming, “Be Happy, Not Gay.”

Until recently, most school boards justified student dress codes on the grounds that they instill a sense of decorum, reflect community values, and promote an atmosphere conducive to learning. For example, in a 1995 opinion, an Indiana appellate court upheld a school policy against boys wearing earrings, ruling that the school board had the authority to enforce community standards. However, students have continued to assert the right to wear what they choose to school regardless of community standards, and they have sometimes prevailed.

Nevertheless, so far at least, no court has ruled that schools are without authority to enforce standards of modesty and cleanliness in student clothing.

Here they get into the gang factor (emphasis mine):

More recently, school districts have asserted a second justification for policing students’ clothing choices: the fear that certain clothing is affiliated with gangs and undermines a safe school environment. Indeed, as DeMitchell and Cobb stated in their study of New England school superintendents, “It is a sad commentary that security, as a value to be pursued in educational policy making, has joined the traditional values of excellence, equity, choice, and efficiency.”

In response to rampage shootings like the ones that took place at Columbine, West Paducah, and Sandy Hook, school authorities have implemented a variety of policy responses, including emergency drills, lock-down procedures, and dress codes banning all black clothing, Goth style clothing, and trench coats.

By and large, courts have been sympathetic to school administrators who seek to enforce school rules to promote student safety. The courts recognize that violence and drugs have become a significant threat in many schools. As an Illinois court put it in a 1996 opinion:

We long for the time when children did not have to pass through metal detectors on their way to class, when hall monitors were other children, not armed guards, when students dressed for school without worrying about gang colors. Those were the days when sharp words, crumpled balls of paper, and at worst the bully’s fist were the weapons of choice.

Without a doubt, gang activity at school negatively impacts the safety of all students. As Michelle Arciaga, Wayne Sakamoto, and Errika Fearby Jones wrote in the National Gang Center Bulletin (November 2010), “Gang members do not leave their conflicts, attitudes, and behaviors outside the school doors. Some of the most dangerous gang activities in any community may take place in and around local schools.”

Since gang members often wear specific items of clothing to signal their gang affiliation, it makes sense for schools to enact regulations that target gang-related apparel. The idea is to restrict the symbols associated with gang membership so that gang members cannot outwardly identify themselves as being part of a gang, thus reducing the likelihood of violence. These regulations, it is asserted, also protect non-gang students from being mistakenly targeted by gang members as a rival.

Two questions arise regarding the use of dress codes to curb gang influence and gang violence. First, are the dress codes constitutional? In other words, do dress codes infringe on the free speech rights of students to express themselves in the school environment? Second, is there research showing that dress code policies are effective in reducing violence and the influence of gangs at school?

A Texas case decided in 1997 illustrates the constitutional concerns about dress codes enacted to suppress gang activity. In Chalifoux v. New Caney Independent School District, a gang known as the United Homies wore rosaries at school, and the school district banned students from wearing rosaries on the grounds that they signaled affiliation with a gang. However, not all students who wore rosaries to school were gang members. Therefore a federal court ruled that the rosary ban infringed on the First Amendment rights of students to express their sincere religious beliefs.

Regarding the second question—whether dress codes have any impact on reducing school violence—research does not support the position that school rules restricting student clothing have any significant effect on safety and security.

Proponents of student-dress codes that target gang-related apparel typically do not cite evidence to support their claims that such codes are efficacious. For example, the National Crime Prevention Council argued that school dress codes banning styles of clothing associated with gangs “can . . . alleviate the worries of students by reducing the gang’s visibility and therefore alleviating pressure for students to join a gang.” This is a reasonable supposition, but no research supports that view. Newspaper accounts and anecdotes are no substitute for empirical evidence supporting restrictions on student dress.

Without a doubt, violence and gang activities are serious problems in many of our nation’s schools, but there are no easy solutions. Too often school leaders adopt simplistic responses like dress codes that require students to refrain from wearing certain items of clothing or clothing of a particular color. Some school districts have even mandated school uniforms that give students no discretion whatsoever about what they wear to school.

But more is required to suppress school violence than rules prescribing what students wear to school. As a high school sophomore observed about a restrictive dress code aimed at gangs wrote:

It doesn’t fix the disease. It covers the symptoms. I think that we’re still going to have the same gang problem. We’re just going to be angry at the administration, and I don’t think that’s the way to go.

Few would disagree with the proposition that students should adhere to basic standards of modesty and decorum when they dress for school. But the notion that restrictions on student dress can make schools safer or improve academic outcomes has no empirical basis. To expect that a ban on students wearing certain types of clothing will transform a school into a safe harbor free from the incursion of gangs and violence offers a vain hope and a false promise. The root causes of violence in the nation’s schools are far more complex and difficult to address than simple restrictions on students’ clothing choices.

Asinine dress codes don’t disappear after graduation. During a stint at a Christian coffee shop in Virginia in 2006, I made recreational reading out of our comically restrictive staff code of conduct. The strangest? Employees were only permitted to wear “simple, white” underclothes. Lacey bras and panties were explicitly prohibited. I never mustered the courage to ask my boss how often he did inspections …

More readers shared their workplace rules, including this woman who apparently once worked with the Peep Toe Police (🚨):

Working for a large (50,000+) company in the late ‘90s, we had to wear closed-toe shoes and “foot coverings.” That meant, even in summer, women had to wear nylons or socks, even with pants and pumps. One day, my boss actually pulled up my pant leg to check that I was wearing them. We all hated the term “foot coverings!”

Another ‘90s horror tale:

I worked in a Fortune 50 internationally known company, and I was based at the world headquarters in NYC. Women were not allowed to wear pants. I witnessed an executive woman sent home in a blizzard because she wore pants that day—a day when about 50% of the people didn’t make it to work because of the blizzard. I guess she couldn’t make decisions that impacted a multi-national, billion-dollar company with her legs covered.

Maybe, this next reader suggests, all of these weird dress codes in high school are just training for a lifetime of weird workplace dress codes:

There are workplaces that tell you what kind of earrings you can wear. They tell you what the color of your suit can be. Where I work, half the people come in to work in their pajamas, but one particular group isn't allowed to wear jeans on Friday because screw you.

Arbitrary, nonsensical dress codes are part of the adult world, so the kids should get used to it.

Now, you may be wondering how a teacher would, um, know what color underwear a student is wearing. This high schooler used that to her advantage in her quest for underwear justice:

As a high school journalist, I was determined to bring about great change to the world. In the end, I really only made a small change. The dress code at my public school in San Diego (between 2001-2003) had a rule that I thought was ridiculous: “Underwear must be worn, but not visible.” I understood the concept, but ... really? You were going to do panty checks to be sure that I was wearing underwear? I don’t think so!

I went to several teachers and employees and asked, “If I told you I wasn’t wearing any underwear, what would you say?” Most of them told me my question wasn’t appropriate. I ran my story in the school paper about the rule being inane and, the next year, it changed: “Underwear must not be visible”—a much better rule, in my humble opinion. And while no one ever said my article was the reason, I’d like to think I had something to do with it.

I attended a small, private boarding and day school in Concord, Mass. from 1995 to 1999. Our dress code had one rule: “Underwear is not outerwear.”

But enough about undies—what about brassieres? Fear the bra strap, if you attended this school:

The weirdest dress code rule was that you could wear tank tops, but not “spaghetti straps.” I think the logic behind this was that visible bra straps were inappropriate. This rule was kind of dumb because strapless bras do exist and even if your tank tops straps were thick enough, it was still quite possible that your bra straps could be visible.

This next reader shares a similar story, but is okay with the policy:

In my New York State public high school, I remember when the style quickly shifted from white baby t-shirts with the graphic prints to spaghetti-strap tank tops. All of a sudden, you could see 75 percent of the female student body’s bra straps on any given day. This predictably caused the school to ban tank tops, a comically ineffective “walk-out,” and a pile of controversy in the last few weeks of the school year. Although the “no tank tops” rule stayed on the books by the start of the next school year, the functional rule was “No visible bra straps or mid-drift,” which I still think is completely appropriate for a school setting.

Oh, and “undergarments” are in the eye of the beholder: One reader wrote in explaining that “plain white t-shirts weren’t ok” at her high school “because they ‘were underwear.’”

When we asked about your weird school dress codes, many of you wrote in with surprising rules about colors. Forget short skirts or untucked shirt-tails. What’s really distracting today’s students are “patterned shoelaces,” according to one reader who attended a public school in Texas.

For some of you, school administrators were fashion police, issuing prohibitions on “clashing” or mis-matched clothes:

The junior high I attended decreed that clothing must match. For example, we could not wear plaids and stripes together, and colors must not clash.

Another reader, Cathy Lehman, said she was reprimanded for what she thought was a nice-looking outfit:

Once I was written up for wearing a very nice shell sweater top and long skirt to school chapel because the sweater had wide stripes in two shades of light brown and the skirt was cream with flowers on it, in matching shades of light brown. I couldn’t believe how arbitrarily that rule could be interpreted, based on any one person’s definition of color or style, or what “clashing” even means. I had truly thought my outfit looked nice.

Shortly after I graduated from the private Christian high school I went to, they rewrote the dress code. Well, if memory serves, not so much “they” as “the headmaster’s wife.” She seems to have written it mostly by asking herself the question, “What clothes do I like to wear?” That’s all I can assume, since the dress code specified pleated khaki pants for the girls (let’s just say that pleated khaki pants that will fit a 14-year-old girl are not easy to find). Weirdly, the dress code listed the colors that students shirts could be, and did not include green. My sister, who was still a student there, said to me, “What do you think Jesus has against the color green?”

But an even greater number of readers wrote in with tales of gang-related fears sparking bans on certain colors of clothes. The most common seemed to be blue and red, the colors of the Bloods and Crips, respectively:

Students at my public junior high school in the late 1990s were never permitted to wear the school colors (red, white, and blue.) Instead, we had to wear khaki pants with a black or forest green polo. Any students wearing red or blue would be suspended for promoting gang-related activity.This was in the relatively safe and quiet suburbs of Tacoma [Maryland], where fears of “crips and bloods” permeated the dress code.

It was the same story in California:

My local middle school had banned students from wearing shirts that were red or blue because they were having issues with gangs. It was sort of funny, seeing as how the middle school'’s colors were red and and gold.

Occasionally, the color restrictions defied market availability, writes Ben, who attended Chicago public middle school in the late 19‘90s:

We had a dress code which required the following—Pants: navy blue or khaki. Shirt: navy blue, white, or school activity shirt.

But the tough part was the shoes, which, in order to avoid “gang colors,” had to be one solid color. They didn’t make solid-color sneakers at the time, because the logo or some stitching would be another color from the body of the shoe. So every month or so, my mother and I would sit down with my sneakers and Sharpies to “touch up” the solid-color-ness of my school shoes.

Responding to our callout for weird dress codes, many readers who attended Catholic schools recall a strict set of rules. Or as Deborah Qualls summarizes it, “Catholic school. Enough said.”

Another reader, Angela Zalucha, gets more specific:

We couldn’t wear shirts with writing on them (and I think logos/pictures too), all because some girl wore a shirt with a pig that said “pig out.” How on earth is that offensive or in bad taste? #CatholicSchool

Kathie Enright Boucher remembers one day in the late ‘60s at her Catholic women’s college:

I was wearing plaid wool Bermuda shorts and coordinated cardigan and knee socks. I was sent back to my dorm room by a nun and told to change into a “nice dress.” To go bowling.

I spent four unpleasant years during the 1960s at a Catholic high school in Central New York. We girls wore brown wool jumpers whose skirts had to touch the floor when we were kneeling, but the really weird part of the uniform was located below the knees. In addition to Spaulding saddle shoes and brown or white ribbed socks, we had to wear nylon stockings. With seams. Under the socks.

I presume the seam requirement enabled the nuns to see that we were really wearing stockings, though we sometimes used eyebrow pencil to try to fool them. I believe that the rationale behind the rule was that No Lady Goes Out of the House Without Wearing Nylons, but maybe the Virgin Mary was thought to have worn them.

Bianca, who asked we not identify her further “since my parents still attend the church that the school is attached to,” describes an attempt to turn shoelaces into a teachable moment:

Our conservative K-12 private Catholic school in California had some extremely weird dress code rules. The one I remember most was the mandate for blue, black, or white shoelaces. Our dress code already required that we all wear lace-up shoes. My 13-year-old self’s attempt to weave green into our uniform for St. Patrick’s Day meant that mine were green. My classmate who started all the ruckus had rainbow colored shoelaces after hers broke. Apparently, staff deemed these “distracting” (but in hindsight, I realized they were upset that it could be perceived as supporting gay rights).

We ended up spending two weeks of class discussing shoelaces instead of history. I’m honestly surprised parents didn’t complain more, since they actually paid tuition for instruction time. I’ve never felt so rebellious for wearing sneakers since.

This was suburban Atlanta in the very late ‘80s. The Billy Ray Cyrus-style mullet was the trend (along with hair metal styles) for guys at the time, but the very conservative school board decided to pass a rule that boys’ hair couldn’t touch the collar. The rule was intended to force guys into the traditional conservative short haircut. The crazy thing was, the guy with the weirdest hairstyle at the school (a punk-rock devotee of Sid Vicious) used toothpaste to spike his equally long hair straight up or straight back so that it never touched his collar.

In any case, there was a school board meeting shortly after the rule was introduced and a large group of male students showed up to protest it, to no avail. Eventually the rule changed, long after I had graduated. It never did make sense in any of the traditional reasons for dress codes (distraction or provocative).

When the new Beatles haircut became all the rage in the ‘60s, our school tried to measure hair length (not unlike the military). At my school, hair could not “drape over the ears,” and the neck had to “be neatly trimmed.”

Still too long? Put it in a ribbon. That’s what Georgia’s classmates in Melbourne had to do in the ‘90s:

If your hair touched your collar, you had to wear it tied up with a red ribbon that was at least 30 centimeters long. Teachers would actually carry rulers with them and periodically ask to check.

But what if it’s too short? Paul Lorigan knows all too well:

I was given detention because my hair was too short. They told me I had to go get a haircut or else. WTH kind of haircut regrows hair!

This anonymous reader was simply judged:

While it wasn’t a rule, one teacher told us that women should be required to have long hair because it showed lack of morals to cut your hair short. (??)

When it comes to tints and tones, several readers noted restrictions to “color that occurs in nature.” From a Texan in the early ‘00s:

“No unnatural hair.” This rule was prone to abuse at my Catholic, all-girls school. Not only was it used to outlaw coloring your hair, it was used to outlaw mousse in your hair and haircuts deemed too “modern.” Basically, it made it so if a teacher didn’t like your hair, you could get detention. Teachers tended to not like the hair of students they already disliked.

On a personal note, the private high school I attended in Maryland, Severn School, still regulates students’ hair: “Hairstyles and hair color must be neat and not be extreme,” reads the 2015-2016 upper school dress code explainer. Whatever that means.

I started high school, in McKinney, Texas, right after Columbine. One of the Columbine shooters was wearing black during the attack. Therefore, in my public high school, we were not allowed to wear all black. That meant no black blouses with black skirts, no little black dresses, no black dress shirts with black slacks. There had to be at least one colorful element. This was, fortunately, during a preppier era, but suffice it to say my current look would not comply.

A few readers also recalled bans on trench coats, including this one: “I was actually suspended the day after Columbine because my trench coat was ‘gang-related clothing.’” In the aftermath of the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, much of the media pointed fingers on the “trench coat mafia.” Here’s a New York Times report from the day after the massacre:

Rendered virtually invisible among the athletes and popular classmates who surrounded them, a small group of students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., found their way out of anonymity by banding together and dressing in Gothic-style clothing highlighted by long, black coats.

They called themselves the trench coat mafia.

The group was easy to notice among the 1,870 students at the school, because every day, no matter the weather, they wore their coats. [...] But investigators now believe that among the dozen or so students in the group were the people responsible for yesterday’s mass shooting at the high school, which left an estimated 25 people dead and at least 20 others wounded.

But the narrative that the assailants were part of a group of embittered goths turned out to be false. Here’s Dave Cullen, reporting for Salon in 1999:

They were never part of the Trench Coat Mafia. They didn’t target jocks, minorities or Christians. They had a hit list, but nobody on it was hit. They expected their bombs and explosives would wipe out most of the school. As investigators get closer to producing an official report about the Columbine High School massacre, it is already clear that much of what was reported last spring about the motives and methods of killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold was untrue.

Cullen went on to spend a decade investigating the shooting, culminating in Columbine(a book I read in college and loved). The month it was published, CNN reported that the trench coat mafia narrative “has been widely refuted, but for goth students around the country, the damage was done”:

Jennifer Muzquiz was “goth” in high school. She had, and still has, multicolored hair, a “face full of piercings,” and an all-black wardrobe, even though she no longer identifies with the goth subculture. And while her style had always earned her her fair share of strange glances, she says everything changed for the worse after the Columbine school shootings on April 20, 1999. [...]

“Parents, often successfully, lobbied to get trench coats and all-black attire banned in their local schools. School administrators started considering these groups to be gangs and harassment of students was rampant, with unwarranted backpack searches, detainment in the hallways by security guards, and being called into the administrative offices for questioning.”

Some school administrators continue to use the shooting to justify dress code rules. Earlier this year, a local news station reported that the founder of a charter school in North Carolina cited Columbine amid claims the school’s dress code discriminates against girls (who are not permitted to wear pants):

In an email cited in the lawsuit, Baker A. Mitchell, Jr., the school’s founder and primary author of the uniform policy, says that the requirement that girls wear skirts was based, among other things, on “chivalry” and “traditional values.” Mitchell’s email cites the 1999 Columbine school shootings as motivating the school “to preserve chivalry and respect among young women and men.”

“As you may recall, the tumult of the 1990’s was capped off by the Columbine shootings April 20, 1999,” that email reportedly reads, “in which two students killed thirteen classmates and injured twenty-four others — fourteen of whom were female.”

Did your own high school change its dress code in response to Columbine? Let us know.

One reason school dress codes are such a lighting rod is that they often have no basis in real-world sartorial standards. Though some rules are common sense, people seem most irked by prohibitions on clothing that wouldn’t be out of place in a business meeting—yet is unacceptable by middle-school standards.

Recently we asked what the strangest dress code was at your school. Dozens of you wrote in, and here are the 11 we deemed most odd:

No holes in jeans, but duct tape is fine:

“This was at a public high school in West Virginia in the mid-2000s—the time just before leggings and yoga pants, which was a dress-code battle after I graduated. The fad at the time was holes in the jeans. The rule shifted every year, from no holes at all to only ones allowed below the knee. The kicker was if you were caught with in appropriate rips or tears in your $50 Hollister jeans, you had to put duct tape over them. Our principal carried a roll of tape with her just in case.

The strangest part was the rule was established because it “looked bad.” But then we were forced to wear duct tape, which makes you look even worse. And of course, this rule completely targeted girls because few boys wore holes in their jeans. The duct tape also ruined the tears, created even bigger holes once the tape was removed. It was bizarre and embarrassing.”

-- Taylor Stuck

No little old Russian grandmas:

“I attended a public high school in rural Ohio from 1998 to 2002. It was the only high school in the entire county, and despite the lack of any real problems (save the occasional student caught with a joint), the teachers and leadership felt it necessary to institute an oppressive dress code. At least once a week, the principal would announce via intercom a new standard. Below are some of my favorites:

NO babushkas (meaning headscarves). As far as I know, we did not have any older Russian ladies attending my high school. To reiterate, the principal announced over the intercom that “babushkas” (not scarves, not hijabs) were banned from the high school.

NO clothes making fun of the president. At the time, George W. Bush was in office. I actually contacted the ACLU on this one, who immediately sent my high school a cease-and-desist letter. They re-instituted the ban the year after I graduated.

NO face paint. Admittedly not very weird, but I got called into the principal's office, where he accused me of wearing white face paint. I am incredibly pale and had to show him my ivory-colored Maybelline foundation as proof.”

-- Anonymous

No cornrows, except in February:

“I went to Loyola High School in Los Angeles, graduating 2005. Since we were in Southern California, the dress code wasn’t really as strict as you might expect at a traditional all-boys prep school, but there were definitely rules.The strangest one was that cornrows were banned EXCEPT during Black History Month.” (Update: A reader who says he went to Loyola disputes this. The high school’s current official dress code doesn’t mention cornrows. Update: Another former student stands behind the claim:

@mimbsy@TheAtlantic I absolutely remember this because I had a giant afro my senior year because we couldn't have cornrows. Except in Feb.

“I attended public high school in a suburb of Harrisburg, PA, in the early to mid 1990s. Our school had a rule that you could not wear shorts after September 15 or before May 15.

Our school also did not have air conditioning. Harrisburg could be oppressively hot and humid well into September and May was often pretty warm too. The rules allowed girls to wear skirts over the knees and culottes whenever they wanted. This led to the yearly tradition of some boys, protesting the rule, wearing skirts to school on the first day over 80 degrees in May and being sent home to change.”

-- Andy Szekely

No mismatched shoes:

“A school in Kentucky where I used to work as a teacher (within the past few years) had many of the standard dress code rules. The one that always stood out, and got the most questions from students when we reviewed the dress code, was that you were required to wear shoes that were of the same style and color. I don’t recall it ever being an issue, but it was never revised or taken out.”

-- Ryan Bringhurst

Sweatshirts were fine, but no hoodies, unless you’re a monk:

“At my Catholic high school in rural Illinois in the early 2000s (long before they had taken on any racial-political connotation), hoodies were banned. The monks, when pressed to answer why the addition of a hood to a sweatshirt caused it to fall outside of the dress code, the students were informed that we could easily hide contraband in the hood. (An idea I hadn’t even though of, so thanks for the tip.) The most infuriating part about this rule is that every single monk wore a habit with a hood.”

-- Anonymous

Dangerous liaisons:

“Girls could not wear the combination of red and black because the girls counselor thought it was too sexy.”

-- Anonymous

No hair clips:

“I went to Catholic school during the ‘80s. Eighth-grade girls were not allowed to wear pantyhose, even for warmth under their knee socks in a Massachusetts winter. But in ninth grade, girls had to wear pantyhose and were not allowed to wear socks, though little ankle socks were very much in style.

Also in style were banana clips—long, curved hair clips that we were forbidden to wear. After the girls repeatedly pressed for an answer as to why these were verboten, we were told that banana clips simulated Mohawks and were therefore insulting to Native Americans.”

-- Kathleen Weldon

Na, na, ya grill:

“I went to a public high school in Midland, Texas. In 2006, my school banned ‘grills,’ the mouth pieces popularized by the Nelly ft. Paul Wall classic, ‘Grillz.’”

-- Brianna Losoya

The third toe leads to lost productivity:

“A job, recently, where open-toed shoes could not expose more than two toes.”

-- Anonymous

Loosely defined Satan:

“In a large public school in the city: ‘No Satanic t-shirts.’ Just that. No explanation, just ‘No Satanic t-shirts.’”

Spring is here, heralding the emergence of that perennial warm-weather menace: the shoulders and lower femurs of teenagers. It’s only March, and students from Fresno to Baltimore are already protesting what they say are unfair and antiquated school dress codes. As Li reported last year, it’s often girls who feel singled out by these rules.

It’s not just students who are up in arms. A group of parents are suing a charter school in North Carolina because the school says girls must wear jumper dresses, skirts, or “skorts” each day.

Some school dress codes, granted, are nothing radical—they’re similar to what you’d encounter in an entry-level job. But others seem to drag far behind mainstream social norms. (Barring a sister-wife situation, in what other context would women not be allowed to wear pants?) Many school clothing rules seem puzzling because they’re so at odds with real-world business attire.

Here’s my personal head-scratcher: I started high school, in McKinney, Texas, right after Columbine. One of the Columbine shooters was wearing black during the attack. Therefore, in my public high school, we were not allowed to wear all black. That meant no black blouses with black skirts, no little black dresses, no black dress shirts with black slacks. There had to be at least one colorful element. This was, fortunately, during a preppier era, but suffice it to say my current look would not comply.

Below are some Atlantic staffers’ most perplexing dress-code rules. We invite readers to submit their own. Please email hello@theatlantic.com, tell us the rule, the time and place (roughly, if you prefer), and whether the school was public or private. Please also let us know if we can use your name.

When I was a high-school sophomore, my school—Punahou (alma mater of none other than Barry Obama)—did something dramatic: It enacted a dress code. This was probably for the better. It was 2005; Abercrombie & Fitch and its barely-there denim shorts and mini skirts were all the rage. It was also Hawaii, where people in general just don't like the idea of clothing. (When I was a freshman, I remember the popular senior girls dressing up as lingerie-clad Victoria's Secret angels for Halloween. They came to school looking like this.)

The new dress code wasn't just any dress code. It was dubbed a “menu of options,” and allowed us to pick our attire from a pre-selected list of shirts and bottoms. Options included an assortment of relatively pricey American Apparel items (two types of T-shirts, a hideous skirt that awkwardly hit me mid-calf that I will remember forever, etc.) and official Punahou clothing (e.g., a club or team shirt or something like this gem from the campus bookstore). We could wear our own bottoms—as long as they came below the knee. For girls, that essentially meant we were limited to long pants, which in Hawaii’s 80-degree weather wasn’t always pleasant.

The school, I recently learned, has since done away with the menu of options. The rationale was to give students more choice, and by 2012 few students were buying options from the menu, anyway. The dress code “has somewhat returned to a statement of values and guidelines,” the school's spokeswoman told me: “neat, clean, and appropriate.” A brief review of the revised policy suggests that it's pretty run-of-the-mill—and rather vague (excessive exposure of the torso, shoulders, or thighs is prohibited, as is clothing that's too tight). My favorite part of the policy? It specifies that footwear is required of all students—but that, yes, slippers (read: flip flops) are A-OK.

Julie Beck, mid-2000s:

Any tank tops we wore in high school had to have at least one-inch wide straps. Any skinnier straps were considered inappropriate or “distracting” (a category which also included hats and bandanas, flip-flops, and shorts & skirts shorter than “fingertip length.” Also gum.) The only time I can remember a tank top actually being distracting was when a boy in my tenth grade history class, after repeatedly yelling that the classroom was too hot, stood up, screamed, and ripped the sleeves off his t-shirt. He was not sent to the office, though.

Gillian White, earlyish 2000s:

I went to a Catholic co-ed high school where the dress code got progressively stricter during my attendance. For the first three years we had a flexible measurement system for uniform skirts, something to the tune of no higher than 3" above the knee, or no shorter than fingertips extended downward (no skirt rolling). At the start of my senior year, the administration implemented a new rule: All girls (of all heights) must wear skirts that are at least 19" in length.

It was a mess. The first day of senior year, all girls had their skirts measured with paper rulers during class. Those who didn’t meet the mark were sent down to the Discipline office so their parents could be called, skirt hems could be adjusted, or detentions could be doled out. I got pulled out of an AP History class, I believe. By the time I got downstairs there was such a large number of young women in violation of the rule that we were directed to sit in the gym on the bleachers while we waited to be reprimanded. I missed at an hour and a half of class that day, while gym classes came in and gawked at the rule breakers. Not going to lie, it felt kind of slut-shame-y.

A local paper caught wind of the whole debacle and wrote about how ridiculous it was, noting that there were teachers at the school whose skirts surely didn't pass the 19" rule. The school relaxed a bit after that, and have abandoned the skirt measuring. But it was a pretty gross moment. I don't remember any other dress code rule that so clearly singled out one group, disrupted their school day, and then put them on display for censure.

Anonymous, 1996-2000:

My all-girls school required us to wear kilts. We could wear tights or even sweat pants under our skirts, but I was always jealous of our rival school, where the girls were allowed to wear kilts or corduroys.

Lenika Cruz, early-2000s:

At a few [private] schools I went to between middle school and high school, super low-cut socks were the thing to do. So people would pull their socks so that the extra material bunched around their toes and tuck it under their feet inside their shoes. Sometimes if your socks were too low, the teacher would make you take off your shoes and there'd be several inches of unused sock just dangling there.

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

“Rich people don’t get their own ‘better’ firefighters, or at least they aren’t supposed to.”

As multiple devastating wildfires raged across California, a private firefighting crew reportedly helped save Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s home in Calabasas, TMZ reported this week. The successful defense of the $50 million mansion is the most prominent example of a trend that’s begun to receive national attention: for-hire firefighters protecting homes, usually on the payroll of an insurance company with a lot at risk.

The insurance companies AIG and Chubb have publicly talked about their private wildfire teams. AIG has its own “Wildfire Protection Unit,” while Chubb—and up to a dozen other insurers—contract with Wildfire Defense Systems, a Montana company that claims to have made 550 “wildfire responses on behalf of insurers,” including 255 in just the past two years. Right now in California, the company has 53 engines working to protect close to 1,000 homes.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.

Journalists have become complicit in spreading the president’s falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Here’s how they can do better.

The news media today face an epistemic crisis: how to publish the president’s commentary without amplifying his fabrications and conspiracy theories.

One flashpoint came several weeks ago, when President Donald Trump told Axios reporters that he planned to use an executive order to end birthright citizenship because, as he put it, “we’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen.” On Twitter, Axios CEO and co-founder Jim VandeHei wrote, “Exclusive: Trump to terminate birthright citizenship.”

As many journalists quickly pointed out, this was multilayered malarkey. The president was proposing an unconstitutional means of obliterating the Fourteenth Amendment on the basis of a falsehood; more than two dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere have unrestricted jus soli laws, like the U.S. Axios was treating as fact a haphazard plan, in search of an impossible outcome, justified by a false assertion.

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

“Rich people don’t get their own ‘better’ firefighters, or at least they aren’t supposed to.”

As multiple devastating wildfires raged across California, a private firefighting crew reportedly helped save Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s home in Calabasas, TMZ reported this week. The successful defense of the $50 million mansion is the most prominent example of a trend that’s begun to receive national attention: for-hire firefighters protecting homes, usually on the payroll of an insurance company with a lot at risk.

The insurance companies AIG and Chubb have publicly talked about their private wildfire teams. AIG has its own “Wildfire Protection Unit,” while Chubb—and up to a dozen other insurers—contract with Wildfire Defense Systems, a Montana company that claims to have made 550 “wildfire responses on behalf of insurers,” including 255 in just the past two years. Right now in California, the company has 53 engines working to protect close to 1,000 homes.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.

Journalists have become complicit in spreading the president’s falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Here’s how they can do better.

The news media today face an epistemic crisis: how to publish the president’s commentary without amplifying his fabrications and conspiracy theories.

One flashpoint came several weeks ago, when President Donald Trump told Axios reporters that he planned to use an executive order to end birthright citizenship because, as he put it, “we’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen.” On Twitter, Axios CEO and co-founder Jim VandeHei wrote, “Exclusive: Trump to terminate birthright citizenship.”

As many journalists quickly pointed out, this was multilayered malarkey. The president was proposing an unconstitutional means of obliterating the Fourteenth Amendment on the basis of a falsehood; more than two dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere have unrestricted jus soli laws, like the U.S. Axios was treating as fact a haphazard plan, in search of an impossible outcome, justified by a false assertion.